The Playboy of the Western World

Did Irish peasants really speak like that? Our critic doesn’t care when there’s this much lyricism to relish

Ruth Negga and Robert Sheehan talk about The Playboy of the Western World

T
he first performances of JM Synge’s masterpiece caused noisy protests in
Dublin in 1907. The portrayal of the Irish peasantry as violent, dishonest
and fond of a drink didn’t go down well, though what really seems to have
upset audiences was the word “shift” (as in petticoat). Yeats’s idea of
calming things down was to call the protesters “commonplace and ignorant
people” who had no books at home.

A century later, we see things differently. Synge’s peasants may not be the
most cultivated of people, and their relation to reality is certainly, ah,
tangential, but by Mother Mary and all the saints, they are alive. They talk
in ceaseless outpourings of pure lyricism, doing with the language of the
colonialist what nobody had done since the Elizabethans. The great question
remains, did Irish peasants really speak like this up until about 100 years
ago, when Synge caught them in their